Users Quick to Switch to QuickTime 6

Apple Computer's free QuickTime 6 media player got a quick uptake in its first 100 days, and it is a boon for the MPEG-4 file format on which it is based, the systems maker said this week.

After 100 days of availability, more than 25 million copies of the software have been downloaded by users, Apple said. While comparable figures weren't available for its previous release, QuickTime 5, that software was downloaded by about 130 million users in its first year, Apple said.

"It's a strong showing for QuickTime, but the real story is the establishment of MPEG-4 as a legitimate choice of media format," said Ryan Jones, an analyst with Yankee Group, in Boston.

Setting the Standard

MPEG-4 is the latest incarnation of the digital compression and decompression technology used to deliver audio and video files over the Internet. A previous version of the technology spawned the MP3, or MPEG-1 Layer 3, file format made popular by file-sharing programs like Napster and Gnutella.

MPEG-4 is backed by 130 companies, representing products as diverse as cell phones, microprocessors, and PC software. However, it is QuickTime that is promoting the technology most prominently, according to Apple and some analysts.

"QuickTime has introduced MPEG-4 into the Hollywood production community and that's an important step for it as a standard," Jones said.

The QuickTime 6 media player, which can play music and videos on Macintosh computers as well as Windows PCs, competes against popular media players from Microsoft and RealNetworks. Apple, in Cupertino, California, released the final version of the software on July 15.

Microsoft and RealNetworks support MPEG-4 on their respective media players only through plug-in software provided by third-party vendors. Instead, those vendors focus on proprietary file formats.

Copyright Concerns

Microsoft has also focused on developing Digital Rights Management capabilities with its digital media technologies, an area that Apple and the MPEG-4 standards group has steered clear of so far. The Redmond, Washington, software maker has built a number of copy protection features into its Windows Media technology that allow content producers to control how their media is played or reproduced by end users.

While MPEG-4 has a layer of security there are no DRM features baked into the file format, according to Frank Casanova, director of QuickTime marketing at Apple. However, Casanova noted that it hasn't been a problem for Apple.

For one, a company called DMod makes available software that allows content producers to add DRM capabilities to QuickTime file so they can be delivered in a pay-per-view fashion. Additionally, as MPEG-4 is developed further, "You can expect to see [DRM] over time based on the standard," Casanova said.

Apple also said this week that users have downloaded 200,000 times its QuickTime Streaming Server and an open source version of that software, called the Darwin Streaming Server. That software allows a Web site operator to host streaming video that is delivered to users over the Internet.